She promptly exposed his false pretensions and past
villanies, and he left Boston and an army of cheated creditors. In 1699
two other attractive and plausible scamps--Kingsbury and May--garbed and
curried themselves as ministers, and went through a course of unchecked
villany, building only on their agreeable presence. Cotton Mather wrote
pertinently of one of these charmers, "Fascination is a thing whereof
mankind has more Experience than Comprehension;" and he also wrote very
despitefully of the adventurer's scholarly attainments saying there were
"eighteen horrid false spells and not one point in one very short note I
received from him." As the population increased, so also did the list of
dishonest impostors, who made a cloak of religion most effectively to
aid them in deceiving the religious community; and sometimes, alas! the
ordained clergymen became sad backsliders.
Nor were the pious and godly Puritan divines above the follies and
frailties of other men in other places and in other times. It can be said
of them, as of the Jew, had they not "eyes, hands, organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions?"--were they not as other men? It is recorded
of Rev. Samuel Whiting, of Lynn, that "once coming among a gay partie of
yong people he kist all ye maides and said yt he felt all ye better for
it." And who can doubt it? Even that extreme type, that highest pinnacle
of American Puritanical bigotry,--solemn and learned Cotton Mather,--had,
when he was a mourning widower, a most amusing amorous episode with a
rather doubtful, a decidedly shady, young Boston woman, whom he styled an
"Ingenious Child," but who was far from being an ingenuous child.
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